Exploring the links between idea generation and motivation

The adoption of specific idea management programs is becoming a strategic asset for organizations as they are increasingly trying to adopt specific organizational solutions to detect, fertilize, evaluate and promote new idea generation within and across their boundaries. The centrality of ideas generation is linked to its vital characteristic of being the main source for new products, services, processes, and drivers of change. This papers deals with the controversial role of general organizational setting and closely focuses on the rewards mechanisms that can further nurture creativity. We submit that understanding of the motivational drivers as well as acknowledging the importance of the organizational settings for individual learning behavior and idea generation is crucial in order to distill the links between idea generation and incentive structures. Consistently, we will conduct a theoretical understanding of the phenomenon in order to explain how new ideas can be nurtured through the adoption of a routine system aligned with general human resource management policy

New Idea Generation and Individual Motivation: A conceptual framework

The adoption of specific idea management programs is becoming a strategic asset for organizations as they are increasingly trying to adopt specific organizational solutions to detect, fertilize, evaluate and promote new idea generation within and across their boundaries. The centrality of the ideas generation is linked to its vital characteristic of being the main source for new products, services, processes, and drivers of change. This papers copes with the controversial role of the general organizational setting and closely focuses on the rewards mechanisms that could further nurture creativity. By formulating a set of propositions, the paper submits that the understanding of the motivational drivers and the organizational settings is paramount to distill the links between idea generation and incentive structures. This paper aims also to critically analyze and assess the impact of extrinsic and intrinsic motivation on idea generation both at an individual and team level, and develop a framework within which explore the necessary change to be adopted by firms in managing the idea generation. What is new to the field is the recognition of the impact of the individual locus of control on creative performance. In this vein the paper sees its ultimate aim in uncovering the dynamics of individual and collective motivation related to creativity, considered as the main source for innovation. The paper concludes that new ideas could be nurtured through the adoption of routine system aligned with the companies human resource management policy

Metabolic Algorithm with Time-varying Reaction Maps

A symbolic-based approach to modelling biochemical processes and cellular dynamics is likely to turn useful in computational biology, where attempts to represent the cell as a huge, complex dynamic system must trade with the linguistic nature of the DNA and the individual behavior of the organelles living within. The early version of the metabolic algorithm gave a first answer to the problem of representing oscillatory biological phenomena, so far being treated with traditional (differential) mathematical tools, in terms of rewriting systems. We are now working on a further version of this algorithm, in which the rule application is tuned by reaction maps depending on the specific phenomenon under consideration. Successful simulations of the Brusselator, the Lotka-Volterra population dynamics and the PKC activation foster potential applications of the algorithm in systems biology

Eliciting the Functional Taxonomy from protein annotations and taxa

The advances of omics technologies have triggered the production of an enormous volume of data coming from thousands of species. Meanwhile, joint international efforts like the Gene Ontology (GO) consortium have worked to provide functional information for a vast amount of proteins. With these data available, we have developed FunTaxIS, a tool that is the first attempt to infer functional taxonomy (i.e. how functions are distributed over taxa) combining functional and taxonomic information. FunTaxIS is able to define a taxon specific functional space by exploiting annotation frequencies in order to establish if a function can or cannot be used to annotate a certain species. The tool generates constraints between GO terms and taxa and then propagates these relations over the taxonomic tree and the GO graph. Since these constraints nearly cover the whole taxonomy, it is possible to obtain the mapping of a function over the taxonomy. FunTaxIS can be used to make functional comparative analyses among taxa, to detect improper associations between taxa and functions, and to discover how functional knowledge is either distributed or missing. A benchmark test set based on six different model species has been devised to get useful insights on the generated taxonomic rules

Bayesian functional emulation of CO2 emissions on future climate change scenarios

We propose a statistical emulator for a climate-economy deterministic integrated assessmentmodel ensemble, based on a functional regression framework. Inference on the unknown parameters is carried out through a mixed effects hierarchical model using a fully Bayesian framework with a prior distribution on the vector of all parameters. We also suggest an autoregressive parameterization of the covariance matrix of the error, with matching marginal prior. In this way, we allow for a functional framework for the discretized output of the simulators that allows their time continuous evaluation

distributed mass balance modelling on two neighbouring glaciers in ortles cevedale italy from 2004 to 2009

AbstractA 6 year application of an enhanced temperature-index mass-balance model to Careser and La Mare glaciers, Eastern Italian Alps, is presented. The two glaciers exhibit very different characteristics, and a comprehensive dataset of distributed mass-balance measurements was used to test the model performance. The model was run using meteorological data acquired outside the glaciers. The work was focused on two main aspects: (1) the development of a morphological redistribution procedure for snow, and (2) the comparison of three different melt algorithms proposed in the literature. The results show that the simple method proposed for snow redistribution can greatly improve simulation of winter balance, and further improvements would be achievable by collecting data on inaccessible and high-altitude areas. All three melt formulations displayed a good skill level and very similar results in modelling the mass-balance distribution over glacier areas, with slightly better results from a multiplicative algorithm in capturing the vertical balance gradient. The simulation errors are related to aspect and elevation, and tend to be spatially aggregated. Some assumptions concerning the spatial and temporal distribution of air temperature and incoming solar radiation, although reasonable and widely used in the literature, may be responsible for this aggregation. Hence, there is a need to further investigate the processes that regulate the distribution of melt energy, and that appear to control the current deglaciation phase in this area

Suitability of ground-based SfM-MVS for monitoring glacial and periglacial processes

Photo-based surface reconstruction is rapidly emerging as an alternative survey technique to lidar (light detection and ranging) in many fields of geoscience fostered by the recent development of computer vision algorithms such as structure from motion (SfM) and dense image matching such as multi-view stereo (MVS). The objectives of this work are to test the suitability of the ground-based SfM-MVS approach for calculating the geodetic mass balance of a 2.1km2 glacier and for detecting the surface displacement of a neighbouring active rock glacier located in the eastern Italian Alps. The photos were acquired in 2013 and 2014 using a digital consumer-grade camera during single-day field surveys. Airborne laser scanning (ALS, otherwise known as airborne lidar) data were used as benchmarks to estimate the accuracy of the photogrammetric digital elevation models (DEMs) and the reliability of the method. The SfM-MVS approach enabled the reconstruction of high-quality DEMs, which provided estimates of glacial and periglacial processes similar to those achievable using ALS. In stable bedrock areas outside the glacier, the mean and the standard deviation of the elevation difference between the SfM-MVS DEM and the ALS DEM was-0.42 \ub1 1.72 and 0.03 \ub1 0.74 m in 2013 and 2014, respectively. The overall pattern of elevation loss and gain on the glacier were similar with both methods, ranging between-5.53 and + 3.48 m. In the rock glacier area, the elevation difference between the SfM-MVS DEM and the ALS DEM was 0.02 \ub1 0.17 m. The SfM-MVS was able to reproduce the patterns and the magnitudes of displacement of the rock glacier observed by the ALS, ranging between 0.00 and 0.48 m per year. The use of natural targets as ground control points, the occurrence of shadowed and low-contrast areas, and in particular the suboptimal camera network geometry imposed by the morphology of the study area were the main factors affecting the accuracy of photogrammetric DEMs negatively. Technical improvements such as using an aerial platform and/or placing artificial targets could significantly improve the results but run the risk of being more demanding in terms of costs and logistics

Analisi della sostenibilità e aspetti di responsabilità legale nella decentralizzazione della produzione mediante stampa 3D

L'abstract è presente nell'allegato / the abstract is in the attachmen

Comparison of dimensional tolerance grades for metal AM processes

Each manufacturing process produces geometric features with some dimensional errors from the ideal nominal geometry. The knowledge of the dimensional tolerances associated with the specific fabrication process is fundamental for choosing the proper sequence of finishing operations to meet the design requirements. While the ranges of dimensional tolerances for traditional manufacturing processes are well mapped in the literature, a little information is available for additive manufacturing (AM) techniques. In this paper, a benchmarking analysis is carried out between two different AM processes for metals and the dimensional accuracy of each AM machine is defined using the ISO IT grades of a reference artifact

An investigation of the influence of 3d printing defects on the tensile performance of ABS material

Recently, the popularity of 3d printing for industrial and consumer use has spread across many different sectors. For this reason, quality assurance of 3d printed parts is becoming increasingly important. The extrusion and layer-by-layer deposition of a polymer filament on the print bed can introduce defects such as pores and voids into the internal structure of 3d printed parts. The relation between 3d printing defects and tensile performance of 3d printed samples is studied in this paper. The study considers tensile specimens of acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS) that were 3d printed by varying the infill strategy and percentage to simulate different levels of strength for the part. Before the tensile tests, the ABS samples were inspected by X-ray tomography to identify the presence of internal voids generated by the 3d printing process. For each sample, data and statistics about the internal defects were used for determining a relation with the tensile test results. The local deformation of the sample and the position of the final fracture were observed using a digital camera and digital image correlation (DIC). In most cases, the experimental results confirmed the matching between the presence of internal voids and the areas of high deformation. However, the position of the specimen fracture did not always coincide with the largest defects. Nevertheless, this study highlights the importance of non-destructive inspection in quality assurance of 3d printed parts when in-situ monitoring of the 3d printing process is not applied. Copyright (C) 2022 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Selection and peer-review under responsibility of the scientific committee of the Third International Conference on Aspects of Materials Science and Engineering